1998 Batten Awards Keynote Address
Changing Newsroom Cultures:
The Tyranny of “Or;” the Power of “And”
Steve Smith
Editor and Vice President
The Gazette, Colorado Springs
In 1990-91 in Wichita, we worked on something that has come to be known as the Wichita Election Project. It was one of the first civic projects in American journalism. It and work done in a couple other cities helped to transform the way American newspapers cover elections.
Afterwards, The Wichita Eagle hosted a meeting attended by several Knight Ridder editors and by Jim Batten, then the CEO. At the close of that session, Jim needed a ride to the airport. His tall, lanky frame was stretched out in the back of my little two-door Oldsmobile and he talked a little bit about the election project.
Jim said he thought The Eagle’s work was some of the most important work in journalism. But he said he knew, as we developed the theory behind some of our practices, there would be people who would be skeptical, who would call us to account for challenging the orthodoxy.
It’s going to be a long haul, he said, but you made a really good start here. I think about that now because I know Jim understood better than we did that we were engaged in a very long exploration — an exploration of what has come to be called civic journalism and that the challenge to develop a true civic orientation and a true civic culture would be an enormous challenge that would take an awful lot of time.v
So I’m honored to be part of any symposium in Jim Batten’s name that gives us an opportunity to share some of what we’ve learned in the intervening years. It’s tragic that we’ve learned all of this without the benefit of Jim’s guidance and counsel.
I’m going to talk a little bit at first about the cultural changes that are absolutely necessary in a newsroom if you’re going to develop a civic orientation that is different from the institutional orientation that is the model of American journalism today and the model most of us grew up with.
It moves toward an answer to the question of why civic journalism might be different from what we’re used to. I’m talking about a civic orientation that goes far beyond the project mentality — civic projects that have a beginning and an end — and infuses a civic sensibility in all of the work that we do, whether it’s in politics, government, arts and entertainment, or sports.
The cultural change that moves us in this direction is all about identifying the speed bumps that get in the way. Anybody who’s been in charge of an American newsroom knows that those speed bumps are numerous, they’re large, and they often come in unexpected places.
Now some of you, especially you Northwestern students, have probably read the book Built to Last. This is a terrific business management book — it has nothing to do with the media — that discusses the qualities of companies that have lasted over time. Companies that have survived culture change, political change, and economic change in our society.
There’s a very powerful three-page interlude on page 43, where authors James Collins and Jerry Porras talk about the Tyranny of “Or.” This is a big speed bump in our newsrooms, this Tyranny of “Or.” It’s the box we find civic journalism placed in all too often. Civic journalism or all other kinds of journalism we’re used to doing. Civic journalism or investigative reporting. Civic journalism or good story telling, that’s the Tyranny of “Or.”
Collins and Porras say companies that have survived over time have rejected the Tyranny of “Or” and understand the power of “And.” So, one of the speed bumps in our newsroom is understanding that we’re not talking about civic journalism in place of traditional journalism, traditional practices, routines and reflexes– but the combination of a set of overarching values, a combination with our best practices, with our best values, with our ethics, that I think constitutes civic journalism.
This is a very powerful combination and is what begins to separate civic journalism from traditional practice. It is the power of “And.”
The power of “And” says that one of the ways we survive as an institution in society is understanding that our journalism is fundamentally built on a set of overarching core values and that we match those core values against our practices, our ethics, our routines, and our reflexes. That combination, the power of that “And,” is extraordinarily powerful.
What are our core values? Pursuit of truth. Fairness. Balance. The values that drive our Fourth Estate watchdog responsibility. How about the value we share with citizens — that we want our communities to be good places in which to live? I would argue that “community” is a core value. That is, we think of our communities, not in terms of their segments or their separate elements, but as a whole, an aggregation of citizens who have a collective responsibility to their community. That community value most assuredly is the core civic value behind our work in Colorado Springs.
Now another speed bump is the reluctance in the newsroom to talk about values.
In my newsroom we talk a lot about overarching journalistic values, and the conversations inevitably make journalists, at least in the beginning, very uncomfortable. We somehow have come to confuse objectivity with disconnection and valueless work. We bleed values out of our journalism because having values is a perceived as a way of muting our objectivity.
I don’t want journalists in my newsroom who don’t have those fundamental core values. If we’re going to move to a civic culture, we have to begin to understand and embrace the core values that brought us into journalism. We have to live by those values. We have to apply them to our every day practices. That becomes a cultural transformation that’s extraordinarily powerful when journalists begin to talk about and understand and accept their own core values.
Here’s another speed bump: We get hung up about journalistic practice. I’ve already given you my initial frame on this, which is that we’re talking about a set of core values that drive our journalism. But we confuse values with practice. So a lot of the civic journalism debate is framed about whether or not we poll readers, whether or not we engage in conversations with citizens. Do we hold a public forum? Do we not hold a public forum? Those are practices.
Civic journalism is not defined by practices. Practices can change. Practices do change. The overarching values don’t change. We adhere to those values over time. My practices in Colorado Springs are going to be different than the practices in Wichita, in Myrtle Beach, in San Francisco, but the overarching values that drive us are going to be similar. So the speed bump that gets us beyond confusing civic journalism with practice, and instead focused on values, is a very important speed bump to overcome.
One last speed bump I want to talk about before I pull out the flip chart and give you some practicalities… There’s a real sense in certain quarters that marketing is the answer to our problems as print journalists or as broadcast journalists. There are some people who think that civic journalism is yet another marketing gimmick. Well, that’s a big speed bump.
What the academics and the marketers tell us is that, to survive economically, we have to think in terms of niche marketing, segmentation, dividing the community into interest groups, some of whom are going to be newspaper readers and some of whom are not. Some are going to be working women who want working-women sections. Some are going to be TV watchers who need good TV sections. Vertical market segmentation, horizontal ownership.
In the years I’ve been involved in newspaper marketing, the trends of newspaper readership and newspaper circulation declines have not been reversed. All I know is, all this good marketing thought hasn’t kicked in as yet. My view is that the marketing sensibility is essentially value sterile. The overarching civic journalism value says that we have to think about our community in its wholeness, as opposed to the segmentation of our community. Those are values in conflict.
One of the reasons journalists react negatively to civic journalism when it’s preached to them in marketing terms is that they understand that the values that brought them into journalism are in conflict with this concept of market segmentation because our job is to serve the whole community.
So, going back to Collins and Porras, as good journalists we have to be savvy in marketing. We have to understand how to sell the product. We have to understand the need for color weather packages and good TV sections and entertainment calendars and sections for working women. That’s all vitally important, but the power of “And” says that we have to do that in combination with a set of journalistic values that drive our enterprise.
What separates us as journalists from the folks who run Microsoft? Well it’s journalistic values. Microsoft may someday have journalistic values. Right now it is market driven.
In our newsrooms, journalists are distraught about what is happening to journalism today, yet they seem incapacitated in too many quarters, incapable of backing away from the model of journalism that they’re practicing and looking at alternatives.
Present them with the power of this “And,” this liberating theory that says you have the ability to be a journalist and live your values. In a value-driven environment, [you can] sell newspapers and serve the community. That’s civic journalism that works in the 1990s and has the power to really drive cultural change in our newsrooms. That’s a combination that really has some clout.
Now I’m going to trot out what I call the Buzz Diagram. I stole this directly from Buzz Merritt who used it years ago in The Wichita Eagle.
This is civic journalism. Two boxes, somewhat overlapping, the area of overlap identified by the cross hatch. This is us [journalists], this is them, the communities we serve, in all of their wholeness.
In Colorado Springs, this box is the community served by The Gazette. All the folks who live in Colorado Springs, their hopes, their dreams, their ambitions, their conversations over the back porch, their life in school, their life in church; their tragedies, their triumphs; the wholeness of their lives, identified in this box. And as in any community, that wholeness is pretty complicated and it’s mostly positive because in Colorado Springs, life’s okay. While we have tragedy; while we have crime; while we have destruction, by and large, life goes on.
This box represents the community box as interpreted by journalists. There is inevitably some overlap and that’s really good to have that overlap. Some of that overlap speaks to our fundamental fourth-estate responsibility: watchdog of government, investigative reporting, provision of certain information, daily weather reports, that kind of thing.
When you think about what we’ve been trained to do as journalists, you can understand why there’s a disconnect because we’ve come to identify objectivity with detachment and disconnection. There’s a lack of involvement, lack of interest, even a certain cynicism about our communities that really separates us from thinking about the lives of the people we’re responsible for serving.
I’m going to give you a very quick personal metaphor that describes how I think those boxes work. When I first moved to Colorado Springs, I moved into a big house in a suburban environment. While we didn’t have front porches, all the orientations of the houses were towards the back. Everybody had decks and they all inter-related. In a fairly short time, I came to know my neighborhood very, very well. I knew who lived there. I knew their children. I knew their ambitions. I knew their tragedies. I knew their politics– very diverse community; very military community. So a lot of ethnic diversity, a lot of economic diversity and yet there was a relationship between all of us.
Now as the editor of The Gazette, if somebody had asked me to write about my neighborhood, I’d be writing from this [community] box, because I lived there. I understood those people. They understood me.
Not too long ago, I moved into a townhouse, not far from the old neighborhood, with a spectacular view of the mountains. Nice townhouse, long driveway, double garage with an electronic opener.
When I come home at night, I pull into the driveway, click the clicker, drive into the garage, sit in my townhouse, open the deck curtains and have the view of the woods, of the mountains and a herd of deer that wanders by my deck. I’ve not met too many of my neighbors because our condos are all oriented towards the outdoors. I have a sense of who lives in the complex because I talked with the managers before I moved in. I kind of understand the demographics. I kind of know the jobs and I’ve sort of met some people, although I could be hard pressed to tell you the names of my next-door neighbors.
Now as a journalist, if I’m asked to write about my new neighborhood, it’s going to be this box [journalists]. All my journalistic skills are going to allow me to reflect some truth about that neighborhood, but it’s going to be a truth that’s disconnected in some ways. It’ll be journalistically true, but it will not be authentic. In that sense, it won’t be accurate, because I’m living in this [journalists] box, I’m not living in that [community] box. That, to my mind, is civic journalism.
So when I talk about civic journalism, I’m talking about moving these boxes into a point of convergence. Never total convergence because some of what we do has to be outside of the box. Remember, that’s the power of “And.”
Now that’s a model you can take back to your newsrooms. The cultural shift I’m talking about is understanding our reflexes; understanding our routines; understanding our values; understanding all the things we do as journalists that allows us to identify and write stories that move those boxes closer together.
Real easy to talk about, real hard to do.